It's the end of the world as you know it – brought to you by a Gnome Mage with big balls of fire

Min/Maxing Gear Before 80 Part 3

Rawr is now making the beat out of your bad gear situation, so what else is important?

Tell Me More… What’s Next?

So now you have optimized what you already posses, the time has come to see what you could aim for.

Back to the optimization window (Tools – Optimize), but this time press the button bottom right – Build Upgrade List.

This may take a while… It takes about 30 seconds for Squidly’s Resto gear and about 5 minutes for Squidly’s Elemental gear, of course my new PC will probably do that all a lot faster than my 4 year old one.

I Can Haz That?

The end result will be a long list of potential upgrades. By default this is the overall upgrade – no matter what the slot. You can change that to a specific slot if you want to… But why would you want to?

Export for Analysis

At this point it helps if you have some spread sheeting knowledge, but it isn’t essential. You could just use it as a more permanent list.

Tools | Copy to clipboard.

Paste this in a new page/tab of your spreadsheet.

Have a quick look through it and cut out the irrelevant rows.

Irrelevant Rows?

Pre-80 you really don’t care about the 0.08 upgrade. Likewise if you leave quests in your selection you will be presented with quests you can’t even receive let alone complete before 80.

Now you can see what is (according to Rawr) the best bang for your buck.

You just have to decide whether it’s achievable, affordable and sometimes wearable (instance drops might require a higher level than you possess).

Whatever the case you have now reduced the hundreds of thousands of items down to the tens – and you can clearly see which ones are better than the others!

Filter it out!

If you are using a spreadsheet tool like excel you can use filters. AutoFilter will do the job in Excel.

Once the filter is on, select the drop down for Source and select Custom…

You can put up to 3 filter conditions in here, so come up with some that suit you…

Begins with “Purchased with”

Begins with “Crafted by”

Contains “ToC”

etc

This can be handy as you enter an instance and you already have a customized loot list at your fingertips, filtered down so you know exactly what you want from this place.

I am including a link here to one of my spreadsheets that I used while leveling. It’s in GoogleDocs for your convenience, but I used Excel.

You will realize pretty quickly I haven’t done anything special. The spreadsheet just serves as a low overhead printable source of the info. If you would prefer to stick to Wowhead or Rawr… Don’t let me stop you!

I just thought of an unlreated use for the Characterprofiler website: clutter management.

If you’re like me, your bank and/or bags have many different versions of Obscurium’s Widget of Unmemorableness. How many items do you have, that you held on to because it was needed for some quest or something, only to forget about it, or its use?

Happens a lot to me.

Being able to export a sortable list of your complete inventory OUTSIDE of the wow game means you can copy/paste the items into thottbot/etc and see what’s what. Don’t need it anymore? DELETE! Woot!

Just a little advice and maybe an idea for another post: Maximizing your DPS its not always the best aproach for leveling purposes. You already have a mana regen set and a burst set… What kind of stats would you like to maximize when you are on your way to 80?
Keep the good job!!

I built those two sets because early on mana is an issue for Resto shaman, particularly in instances, but I wanted to keep a burst set for the more intense, but short fights…

The added advantage being that I wasn’t vendoring gear that would be more useful once mana ceased to be an issue.

From memory there is a 3rd option in Rawr for Resto Shaman optimization… I think it’s survivability. Elemental shaman had a lot more options.

Of course Rawr is built for end game raid optimization, so you need to use a bit of your imagination… still you are looking for spellpower (kill fast less damage taken and mana used), mana regen (less downtime) and of course stamina (make sure you survive).

I know that when leveling as Ele I went down that path. Quick kills and mana ( mana regen) to spare (using mana stream totem as well) for heals = no downtime.

Similar with my Mage. High spell power with (frost)fire spec meant I rarely got hit (dead mobs do no damage) and rarely stopped for mana.

Ohhh and this is blog comment #4,000… for once I get to score the big one.